Many of us got out of college in the 1970s, when getting a job without much on your resume seemed about as impossible as it does today.
We can remember sending out dozens of letters to prospective employers and getting back piles of rejections (if we were lucky enough to get any answer at all). And we didn't have the advantage of doing this electronically; we actually had to type every letter on a typewriter (hence the necessity of Wite-Out), then put stamps on our plaintive missives and haul everything to the mailbox.
But despite these technical differences, we feel a kinship with our twentysomething kids, who are going through the 2010 version of this struggle in another economic downturn. We've given them so much -– the best educational opportunities, lot of extracurriculars like sports, art and music programs, semesters abroad -– and yet, they are struggling just as we did to find their footing in an unpredictable job market.
Families in this situation (and there are literally millions of us) tend to fall into one of two traps. The first is to coddle the kids, letting them settle back into their old bedrooms and dependent habits. You're doing their laundry and yelling at them to clean up their rooms just as you did in their high school days.
The longer this goes on, the more both sides begin to seethe at each other. The other trap is just as bad. You decide you are going to solve their problem by determining their future. You pull in every favor to get them a job and coach them meticulously on what they should say in interviews. Then, if they're lucky enough to get hired, you make them go over every aspect of every day -– a kind of micromanagement that's inappropriate even in preschool.
You know why you do this: You love your kids and want the best for them. But it's wrong, and on some level, you know it's wrong.
Here are some tips from the experts on how to deal with jobless kids:
1. Be positive. Assure them that the economy will get better eventually (even if recovery seems far off now). Encourage them to focus on their strengths. What do they do well? What skills are most marketable? Do they have talents that can provide at least part-time employment?
2. Let them take the lead. Don't push; instead guide them gently toward promising opportunities. Remind them of contacts they have made on their own, either through summer jobs, internships or school. Encourage them to nurture their own networks. They need that help now, but they'll also need it in the years ahead.
3. Appreciate the virtues of failure. Remind them that setbacks are inevitable. No one's life is a smooth course from zero to 60 and as we know from our own early experiences, learning to cope with difficulty early on is great preparation for overcoming future obstacle.
Nothing lasts forever, and that's as true of bad times as good ones. We lived through the stagflation of the 1970s, layoffs in the 1980s, the tech booms and bust of the 1990s and now the Great Recession. We survived and your kids will, too.